Dexter's Final Cut

EIGHTEEN

This time the body had been left in a dumpster on the docks in Coconut Grove, near City Hall, just half a mile or so across the water from the Grove Isle Hotel, where I was staying with Jackie. I could see the high-rise profile of the hotel quite clearly as I got out of the car, standing tall above the painfully bright glare from the water.

The yellow perimeter tape was already up, with two uniformed cops in front of it, standing with that solid, meaty stance that cops everywhere seem to fall into instinctively when they put on the uniform. Even Deborah had stood like that back in the days when she wore the blue to work. Their eyes swiveled toward me, and I stepped forward, reaching for my ID.

“Yeah, hey, Dexter,” Renny said from behind me, and I turned to look at him. Robert hurried past us, headed for the two cops by the yellow tape. Like he had last time, he would stand there by the perimeter, joking with the cops, so he wouldn’t have to see the wonderful horror in the Dumpster. But this was Renny’s first dead body, as far as I knew, and he stood uncertainly, licking his lips and glancing longingly at Robert’s retreating back. “Robert says the last one was fucking sick,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “Robert didn’t really get a good look at it.”

“Ran his ass away screaming and hurling chunks, huh?” Renny said, just a ghost of a smile on his face.

“He didn’t actually scream,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Renny said, looking once more at Robert, and then beyond him to the Dumpster. “Hey, seriously,” he said. “How bad is this gonna be?”

It may not be the very best character reference for me, but I was very eager to see whether this body was indeed the work of Bone-head Patrick, and if there was anything different about it, and I was growing annoyed listening to Renny’s dithering instead of peeking in at the surprise in the Dumpster. So reassurance was not uppermost on my mind. “Oh, it’s going to be very bad,” I said. “Come on; I’ll show you.”

He didn’t move. “Do I really got to look at this shit?” he said.

“Well,” I said, torn between my duty to shepherd Renny and my growing desire to see the waiting wonder, “you really should see what Vince does at a crime scene. I mean, that’s what your character does, right?”

Renny looked at the Dumpster out on the dock, and swallowed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. Then he gave me a hard look and I saw once more the small gleam of some interior Something flaring up. “But I throw up, you cleaning it up.” He took a deep breath, and then moved past me with determination in his pace and steel in his spine, and hopefully not too much in his stomach.

I followed behind Renny until he was ten feet from the Dumpster, and then he stopped dead. “I can see Vince fine from here,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing about it, so I slid past him and right up beside Vince Masuoka, who crouched in the shade of the Dumpster. “You’re just in time,” Vince said.

“For what?”

“Now the real fun starts,” he said. He jerked his head over to one side. I looked, and about forty feet away I saw Detective Anderson talking to a thin, white-haired man in khaki pants, a pale blue polo shirt, and boat shoes. Even from this distance, the white-haired man looked badly shaken.

“Anderson has a witness,” Vince said. “The old guy is off one of the big sailboats. He saw somebody dump a rolled-up carpet in here and take off in a kayak.”

The kayak gave me pause; did Patrick have a new, Miami-flavored way to get around? Or was it possible that somebody else had done it this time? Feeling a small flutter of uncertainty and rising interest, I stepped past Vince and peeked inside, into the heart of the garbage.

The girl’s body lay on top of a chunk of dirty brown carpet, the kind of ratty, stained carpet you can see in the garbage in any residential area where someone is remodeling. It was partially unrolled, just enough to see the top half of a very bad time, and not enough to hide the other contents of the Dumpster.

It was almost all garbage-no paper or cardboard or plastic wrappings like the last time. This Dumpster was used by the people from the rows of large yachts at the nearby dock, and by anyone who used the fish-cleaning station nearby, and the smell rising up from inside was enough to kill small animals at ten paces. But it didn’t discourage the nearly solid cloud of flies that whirled around the heaps of moist, sloppy rotting leftovers. And, of course, it didn’t have any effect at all on the dead girl who perched naked on top of the putrid mound of decomposing gunk.

It looked like she’d had a very hard time of it. Like the previous victim, this one had been hacked, stabbed, bitten, and clawed with an undisciplined but frenzied abandon, a wild impatience that had left very few patches of visible skin unmarked by trauma.

The state of the blood around the wounds indicated that she had been alive for most of the cuts, gashes, and punches, an entire arsenal of attacks that left the corpse looking like she had spent a week at the Academy of Psychotic Assault.

Once again a large hank of golden hair had been ripped out by the roots, leaving a raw, dark red section of scalp exposed. Under that hair, so very like Jackie’s in color and cut, there was not much recognizable left of the face that wasn’t slashed by fingernails, teeth, and knife blade, but something about the profile tugged at my memory for a second, before I shrugged it off. Of course she looked familiar-she looked like Jackie, just as all the other victims did. That was the whole point of it for Patrick.

I looked a moment longer, but saw nothing helpful, so I stepped back and looked down at Vince.

“Did you find anything?” I asked him, without too much hope-and truthfully, without too much interest, either. I knew who had done it, and I couldn’t be more certain even if Patrick Bergmann had signed his work.

“Just this,” Vince said. He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside I could see the outline of what looked like a small bar of soap, the kind of small soap bar hotels leave in the bathrooms for their guests. “You don’t want to know where I found it,” he added happily. I leaned in for a closer look, and through the plastic I could make out the crest and the words “Grove Isle Hotel and Spa” in ornate script.

Vince shook it playfully. “Maybe it’ll help Anderson figure out who the victim is this time,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say that it didn’t seem likely, that Anderson wouldn’t figure it out if he had notarized statements from the killer and the victim, and then I closed my mouth and took a step back and didn’t say anything at all.

Because I knew who she was. I remembered why she looked familiar, and it was not because she looked like Jackie. It was because I had seen her, standing in a hallway and blushing, smiling, pleased with being so very near to her real-life hero, Jackie Forrest.

I rattled the handles of my memory bank and came up with it: Her name was Amila, and she was the maid at the Grove Isle Hotel who had come to clean up the mess on the floor of our suite, and told me she styled her hair to look like Jackie Forrest’s hair, and it got her killed.…

Some small shady something tickled my spine, just a tiny breeze of unease, telling me that someone was watching, and I turned away from the Dumpster and looked, out beyond the pier with its two rows of boats, and into the painfully bright glare of the bay.

Less than fifty yards away, straight out from the end of the dock, a small yellow dot bobbed on the light chop. A paddle rose as I watched, and dipped down to make two small strokes to keep the nose pointed in at us: a double-headed kayak paddle.

Behind the kayak, as if to underline this heavy-handed hint, the Grove Isle Hotel towered up into the bright afternoon sky: the hotel where Jackie and I stayed. The hotel where Amila had worked until Patrick ended her career.

The paddle dipped lazily again, turning the boat slightly sideways so there could be no doubt at all what it was: a kayak. It was the perfect boat for Patrick’s outdoorsy lifestyle. They were light and therefore very easy to steal, and it would certainly be simpler than trying to conceal a dead body on a motorcycle. A quick trip across the half mile of water, dump the body, and then paddle away just far enough to watch the fun.

And of course he would watch. Not merely to see the excitement when his project was discovered-he would also be watching to see who showed up, because Jackie had made an appearance the last time, and he would want to see her when she came to this one, too. Without even thinking about it, I knew how important that was to him: to have Jackie look, and see, and know it could have been her-that it would be her so very soon-and to know he was watching her and waiting to make it happen again, to her.…

But to do it like this was pure hubris. He had taken a huge chance, dumping this body in broad daylight from a small boat. And I was quite sure it was not because he was getting bolder. This kill had come too soon, right on the heels of his last, breaking the pattern and revealing the first rift in Patrick’s mountain-man armor. Because as he got closer to Jackie, as he watched the hotel through all the hours of the night, waiting for a chance-waiting for even a glimpse-his frustration had been growing, eating at him, hitting so hard that his satisfaction from the previous victim had lasted only a few pitiful days. Soon these surrogates would not be enough for him; he had to have Jackie, but he could not get to her, and so he watched and waited and the frustration grew as each day slipped past, repeating the day before, without even the smallest window of opportunity.…

Patrick was getting impatient. He was losing his ability to wait for just the right moment, and feeling the pressure of time racing unstoppably by, with nothing to show for it except a dwindling bank account. By killing the maid now he was trying to push things toward a climax, challenging us to see him so very nearby, daring us to do something, defying us to try to stop him, keep him from doing what he was going to do.

And oddly enough, in those two or three seconds as I squinted into the glare on the water at Patrick in his kayak, following all these little insights as they raced through my brain, I found another small thought burbling up underneath and popping into daylight with the happy snap of a bright pink bubble of chewing gum, and that thought went like this:

All right, Patrick. I accept your challenge.

For a moment I wasn’t really sure what I meant by that, and I blinked, turning away from the glare on the Bay and staring off the dock, back toward the yellow perimeter tape, where Robert stood chatting with the two uniformed cops. No sign yet of Deborah and Jackie, which was all to the good. I looked beyond the perimeter, over the growing crowd of gawkers and into the busy streets of Coconut Grove. The Grove, that happy mecca for Miami’s idle rich, with its high-priced boutiques, quaint shops, and casually posh restaurants. The Grove, where Dexter had lived for so long before his marriage, and where even now, Dexter kept his fishing boat only a mile or so from this very spot-

Oh. Fishing boat. That must be what I meant.

I looked at my watch; it was one forty-five, only an hour and change before the conference with Cody’s teacher. I looked back at Patrick, bobbing there so insolently on his pilfered kayak, and the sight of him tripped a switch in the sinister clockwork machinery of Dexter’s bleak brain. A wheel chunked into gear and hit a lever that tipped a metal plate over and onto a fulcrum that thumped into a shiny cold ball so it rolled down the chute and into the “out” basket, and I picked it up, held it in my hand, and heard it whisper, There is just enough time.

And there would be.